Walking with Plato

by Gary Hayden

  When I say that the artist must be attuned with her medium, I mean that she must be skilled in using the tools and techniques of her craft.

  Again, in The Japanese Way of the Artist, Davey recounts how he once watched his shodo [Japanese calligraphy] teacher execute, many times, without the slightest hesitation, a beautiful and evocative brush-stroke. He says, ‘To a casual observer it might have seemed to be nothing more than a quick flick of the brush; but to me, someone who had many times tried to produce this particular and powerful brush stroke, it was much more.’

  Similarly, when a songwriter creates a lyrical and musical phrase that perfectly captures some aspect of experience, it may appear nothing to the casual observer. But to me, someone who has tried many times to capture the essence of a thought, an idea, or an experience in words, it’s much more. It’s a triumph of craft, experience, and skill.

  The first verse of The Shirelles’ ‘Soldier Boy’ is a prime example. They’re just a few simple brush-strokes, but they’re perfectly executed. They make no attempt to describe the naive ecstasy of young love, but they suggest it. They awaken many thoughts and feelings – sad as well as sweet.

  And just as you could look for hours at a piece of Japanese calligraphy – perhaps a single kanji executed from a few swift brush-strokes – and find nothing in it that could be improved, so you could sit for hours and ponder those lyrics, and find not a syllable that could be altered for the better.

  And then, of course, there’s the music. Without it, the lyrics of most pop songs are sterile. Silly even.

  So what’s the magic of music? What gives certain sequences of notes (mere vibrations in the air) the power to bring words to life, and to move us so deeply?

  That’s quite a question.

  I remember, as a child, waking up one summer morning to the sound of music.

  I shared a bedroom wall with the little girl next door. She’d received a Bontempi organ for her birthday, and was practising her first tune, the opening to ‘Morning Mood’ from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite.

  For a long time, I lay in bed listening as she repeated the same notes over and over and over again: C-A-G-F-GA C-A-G-F-GAGA . . . (pause) . . . C-A-G-F-GA C-A-G-F-GAGA.

  It was the loveliest thing I’d ever heard.

  I knew nothing about classical music. I’d never heard of Grieg, and wouldn’t have known Peer Gynt from Carmen. But those notes, badly played, with one finger, on a child’s plastic instrument, filled me with an exquisite longing that I’d never known before.

  I didn’t realize it then, but it was my first encounter with Beauty.

  When the music stopped, I lay puzzling over what had happened. Those notes had set me longing for something. Something other-worldly. Something intangible. But what?

  Little did I realize that, forty-odd years later, I’d still be grappling with the same question.

  Plato grappled with it too.

  Plato is probably the greatest, most influential philosopher ever to have lived. In fact, the twentieth-century English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once summed up the entire European philosophical tradition as ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’.

  Clearly, then, Plato had a lot of important and interesting stuff to say about a lot of important and interesting stuff. But, for my money, the most important and interesting stuff he ever said was about Beauty.

  He too had encountered Beauty, in its various guises, and he too struggled – though admittedly with more success than me – to understand it.

  One of his early dialogues, Hippias Major, is entirely devoted to the question ‘What is Beauty?’ In it, two characters, Socrates and Hippias, thrash out the question together, and come up with six increasingly sophisticated attempted definitions, beginning with ‘a beautiful maiden is beautiful’ and ending with ‘the beautiful is that which is pleasing through hearing and sight’. But none of these definitions proves satisfactory. None of them gets to the heart of what Beauty is.

  Plato continued to wrestle with the same question throughout his life, and came up with ever more sophisticated – and, some would say, ever more fanciful – answers.

  Eventually, he decided that, in addition to all of the individual beautiful things in the world – all of the beautiful faces, flowers, sunsets, landscapes, poems, and melodies – there had to be something more. There had to be Beauty Itself.

  Beauty Itself is divine. It is perfect and eternal. It exists outside the physical world, beyond space and time. It is the source of all earthly beauty, and of all that is good and right and true. It is invisible to the senses, but known, albeit imperfectly, to the soul.

  According to Plato, every fleeting experience of beauty we have in this world is a pointer to Beauty Itself. Whenever we gaze upon a rose, or into the eyes of a lover, or up into the starry sky, our souls are being drawn to it.

  It sounds fanciful. Ridiculous even. But there’s something about it that feels right. Because, whether it exists or not, Beauty Itself is precisely what I was grasping for, as a child, when I heard that melody from Peer Gynt. And Beauty Itself is what I was grasping at when, as I teenager, I fell in love. And it is something I’m still grasping after today.

  Wendy and I arrived, late in the afternoon, at our pub-hotel in Carlops, and spent the evening relaxing hard in preparation for a long walk to Innerleithen.

  The following morning, we woke early, washed and dressed, packed our rucksacks, and hurried down to breakfast.

  Except that there was no breakfast. Nor any sign of life.

  The restaurant and bar were in half-darkness and eerily silent. There were no breakfast places set. No enticing smells wafting in from the kitchen. No pleasant clatter of crockery and pans.

  There was no landlord. No waiter. No chef.

  Nobody.

  It was like waking up on-board the Mary Celeste. Or going down to breakfast, post-Rapture, at a motel in Knoxville, Tennessee.

  We sat at a table and waited. But nothing happened. So I got up and peeked into the kitchen, which was empty and dark.

  On my way back to the table, I spotted some boxes of cereal, some milk, and some cartons of juice on the bar counter. Beside them was a note explaining that the chef was unable to come in that morning. It instructed us to help ourselves to cereal, deduct ten per cent from our bill, leave payment . . . and be on our way.

  I had the feeling – perhaps wrongly – that the note had been scribbled in haste by someone anxious to avoid any interaction with possibly disgruntled guests.

  Sadly, the cereals were all of the chocolate/honey/sugar-coated varieties that are inedible to persons above eight years old. So I scribbled a note of my own, leaving my email address and telephone number, and offering to negotiate a fair price for our breakfastless stay. I never did hear from them. But my offer still stands.

  From Carlops, we continued southeast, taking a rambling route for twenty-four miles to Innerleithen, a small town in the Scottish Borders.

  During the morning, we walked for ten miles across a sparsely populated area of farmland and woodland. It had few footpaths, and so we had to cobble together a route from any bits of minor road we could find that went in vaguely the right direction.

  At midday, we arrived at Eddleston, our first village of the day. From there we’d intended to walk along a dismantled railway, alongside the rivers Eddleston Water and Tweed, to Innerleithen.

  Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the railway path. The bits that were marked as such on the map seemed to have been transformed into houses and gardens in the real world. So, rather than enjoying a congenial riverside walk, we had to slog fourteen miles along the uncongenial A703.

  It wasn’t a great day, especially since we didn’t find a shop where we could buy ‘breakfast’ until we passed through the town of Peebles, midway through the afternoon.

  That night, we stayed on a campsite at the edge of Innerleithen, beside the River Tweed. This was actually rather nice since the town is surrounded by some pretty hills. So the
day ended pleasantly.

  From there, we walked seventeen miles along a cycle route, following the winding course of the River Tweed, to Melrose: a small town that lies adjacent to the larger town of Galashiels.

  For Wendy, this was a pleasant riverside walk through woods and fields and across moorland hills. But for me it was a day of blister-agony, especially the last couple of urban miles through Galashiels and Melrose to our campsite.

  Although we had walked for only three days since leaving Edinburgh, I had to take a rest day at Melrose. My feet hurt so badly that, apart from hobbling a few hundred yards to a café, I barely moved for the entire time.

  In my walking-induced meditative state, I not only listened to music the way I did when I was a teenager, I read that way too.

  Throughout JoGLE, while lying in my sleeping-bag at night, I would read a chapter or two of War and Peace. And, as the journey progressed, I felt more and more in tune with what Tolstoy had to say.

  Whenever I read a novel, it’s my practice to highlight any passage that moves or inspires me. And by this stage of my journey I’d highlighted scores of passages from War and Peace. Every few pages I came across something that made me mentally exclaim, ‘Yes – I see it too!’

  This made me recall being nineteen or twenty years old, and lying on my bed, one evening, reading J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey.

  When I reached the final section, where Franny, who is having some kind of breakdown, learns the great secret that pulls her back from the abyss – namely that the ‘Fat Lady’ is Christ himself – I experienced a kind of ecstasy.

  Like all intense aesthetic experiences, it’s impossible to describe except by analogy. It was as though something had expanded inside my chest, as though my soul had floated up out of my body, as though a door inside me had been unlocked.

  I’d been an avid reader since I was five years old, and had loved and enjoyed hundreds of books. But, until that moment, I’d never imagined that a book, a story, a collection of words, could do that to someone.

  The same thing – the expansion of the chest, the floating of the soul, the unlocking of the door – has happened to me, more than once, while listening to Kate Bush.

  For example, I recall listening to the Hounds of Love album, one time, and somehow the experience became transcendental. The words, the music, the emotion, and the sound of her voice began to resonate – to throb – inside me. I was transported.

  Both of these experiences were, I believe, examples of what the Ancient Greek rhetorician Longinus labelled ‘the sublime’.

  In his essay Of the Sublime, Longinus observes that certain works of poetry and rhetoric have the power not just to entertain us or to convince us, but to ravish us, to transport us.

  ‘Great writing,’ he says, ‘does not persuade; it takes the reader out of himself.’ It ‘commits a pleasing rape upon the very soul of the reader’.

  Works of such quality and power, Longinus claims, can proceed only from writers of genius: those with elevated and impassioned spirits, with grand and lofty ideas, and with the ability to communicate all of this through the inspired use of words, rhythms, and figures of speech.

  Of course, the experience of the sublime depends not only upon the qualities of the writer, but also upon the qualities of the reader.

  I see it this way. When Salinger wrote Franny and Zooey, he had a profound insight throbbing inside him. This wasn’t something he could express directly, but only through the medium of a story, through the interplay of various characters, through certain rhythms and figures of speech.

  My nineteen- or twenty-year-old self was receptive and sympathetic to this idea, was already, in a sense, grasping for it. But it required Salinger’s genius, passion, plotting, characterization, and inspired use of language to bring it to birth.

  Similarly, on those occasions when Kate Bush’s music has transported me, it’s because somehow, through her inspired use of words, music, sounds, and images, she has caused something deep within her own soul to resonate with something deep inside mine.

  And there, on JoGLE, the same thing was happening with Tolstoy. The combination of his genius and my receptiveness enabled me to appreciate, in a deep way, the sublimity of his work.

  For the next stage of our journey, from Melrose to Jedburgh, we could have taken an eighteen-mile scenic route along St Cuthbert’s Way: a sixty-two-mile walking trail that begins at Melrose and ends at the island of Lindisfarne, off the Northumberland coast, in England.

  However, my feet were so tender that we opted for a more direct route instead. This took us thirteen miles, mostly along nondescript minor roads, but also along a section of Dere Street, an old Roman road.

  Dere Street originally ran between Eboracum (York) and Inchtuthil near present-day Falkirk. A lot of it still exists today in the form of A-roads, but the section we walked is now a tree-lined grassy track that passes through Ancrum Moor, where the Scots won a notable victory over the English in 1545.

  This four-mile section of the walk was a real treat, but it would be difficult to explain why. It was a dead-straight walk through rough pasture. It passed by a few farms, a couple of streams, a pond or two, and the occasional gnarled old tree. Nothing special when you come to analyse it. But somehow, it just was fabulous.

  It was while passing through Ancrum Moor that Wendy and I first started to play ‘Fives’: a conversation game that kept us entertained, on and off, all the way from Melrose to Land’s End.

  The ‘game’, if it deserves that title, was simplicity itself. We just picked a category – footpaths, animals, real ales, shower blocks, or whatever – and together compiled a list of the top or bottom five, so far, on JoGLE.

  We loved that game. And a large part of the reason we loved it is because, by that time, we’d both become such pleasant companions.

  In a letter to his niece, Kierkegaard wrote: ‘I had been walking for an hour and a half and had done a great deal of thinking, and with the help of motion had really become a very agreeable person to myself.’

  In a similar way, during the scores of hours that we had been in motion since leaving John o’Groats, Wendy and I had become very agreeable persons to ourselves – and, consequently, to each other.

  It was odd, really. You would think that spending every hour of every day together for such an extended period of time might have made us bored and irritable with one another. And, in normal circumstances, perhaps it might have done. But, out there in the countryside, it didn’t. Quite the reverse.

  Walking through the countryside, getting plenty of fresh air and exercise, and escaping from the workaday cares and stresses of life, brought out the nicer, more agreeable people inside us.

  Wendy sometimes assures me that there’s a generous and caring person inside my moody, taciturn exterior. And it was one of JoGLE’s most unexpected pleasures, for me – and perhaps for her – to see him emerge.

  Although the walk from Melrose hadn’t been a long one, it had – thanks to my tender feet – been a slow one. So it was early evening by the time we arrived at Jedburgh.

  Jedburgh is an attractive town, situated just ten miles north of the Scottish/English border. It has a ruined abbey, a castle jail, shops, cafés, riverside walks, and whatnot. But Wendy and I passed straight through it to the busy camping site nearby.

  From Jedburgh, our plan had been to walk northeast along St Cuthbert’s Way to Kirk Yetholm, at the northern end of the Pennine Way.

  However, mindful of the days we had lost, due to Wendy’s trashed feet, on the first stage of our journey, and mindful of the fact that we wanted to finish JoGLE by mid-October when the autumn weather would begin to bite, we decided instead to head southeast and pick up the Pennine Way at the village of Byrness, in England.

  This shortcut enabled us to claw back two days of lost time, but at the cost of having to endure a nineteen-mile slog along the A68 to Byrness.

  The highlight of the walk was stopping for Mars bars and coffee at a snac
k-bar called The Borderer, on a concrete layby on the A68, at the Scottish/English border.

  The day – and the fourth stage of JoGLE – ended very pleasantly, though, with our arrival at the Forest View Inn, in Byrness.

  This former YHA hostel is managed by a retirement-aged couple, Joyce and Colin, who offer free camping in their garden to backpackers who agree to purchase their evening meals at the inn.

  Wendy and I knew we had stumbled upon somewhere special the moment we arrived. We were greeted by Colin, who sat us down in the conservatory with tea and biscuits while he scuttled off to clean and dry our boots.

  We had expected that camping in the inn’s grounds would be a rough-and-ready affair. But to our surprise we found that campers (and Wendy and I were the only two) got a nice, clean bathroom, with hot shower, to themselves.

  Throw into the mix a warm lounge with comfy chairs, a three-course meal, draft ale, and the convivial company of slightly tipsy fellow hikers, and you’ll understand why we look back on Forest View with enormous affection.

  Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

  Chapter Five

  Getting There

  Byrness – Bellingham – Once Brewed – Greenhead – Alston – Dufton – Langdon Beck – Baldersdale – Keld – Hawes – Horton in Ribblesdale – Airton – Skipton – Cowling – Hebden Bridge – Standedge – Crowden

  The haphazard route Wendy and I had taken from Milngavie to Byrness had been largely forgettable. But the next stage of our journey certainly wasn’t.

  The Pennine Way, Britain’s oldest and most celebrated National Trail, steers a 267-mile course through some of the wildest, remotest, and most captivating countryside you could ever hope to see.